Manchester Museum Will Be Able To House Major International Exhibitions With 4 2m Grant

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Manchester Museum, part of The University of Manchester has received a confirmed grant of £4,215,800 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for a major capital project.

Thanks to money raised by National Lottery players, the project will develop and transform the museum by providing new exhibition space, the North’s first South Asian gallery and an improved programme of outreach.

Through ‘The Courtyard project’, Manchester Museum will become the UK’s most imaginative, inclusive and caring museum. As the UK’s leading university museum, the museum is committed to becoming an ever more powerful source of inspiration for learning for more people. This transformation, driven by social purpose, will make the museum more relevant and welcoming to all ages and communities.

Work will start in August 2018 and the finished building will reopen in late 2020. The transformation will include;

A major new Temporary Exhibitions Gallery enabling the museum to become the North of England’s leading venue for producing and hosting international-quality exhibitions on human cultures and the natural world. The 421m2 space will be a new home for blockbuster and international shows, drawing visitors from across the North of England who previously would have had to travel to London to see shows of such scale.

The North of England’s first large-scale gallery of South Asian history and culture, created in partnership with the British Museum, bringing together the very best of Manchester Museum’s own South Asian collections and world-class sculpture, textiles and artefacts from the British Museum. It will be the UK’s first permanent gallery to explore the stories, experiences and contributions of diaspora communities. At the heart of the gallery will be a unique performance space, dedicated to showing the very best live music, dance and performance from and inspired by South Asia.

A new Oxford Road-facing entrance, welcome area and shop, to create a more visible and welcoming first impression. Throughout, particular emphasis will be placed on accessible design for older visitors and people with a disability.

Underpinning the transformation, there will be a dynamic co-created participatory programme to imaginatively address some of the key issues of our time; climate change, ageing, migration and belonging. This will extend the museum’s award-winning volunteering work and be pivotal to changing how we work with and reach new audiences

“With new world-class spaces for extraordinary objects and stories, more volunteering opportunities and imaginative partnerships, Manchester Museum will reflect and explore the needs, interests and opportunities of the diverse communities we serve. The project will develop and transform the museum to bring more wonder and inspiration from around the world to the people of Greater Manchester and beyond.” – Esme Ward, Director of Manchester Museum

SEFM is a UK-based informal network of museum and gallery professionals who want to promote and encourage sustainability in all we do in this field, with a particular focus on the production and staging of exhibitions.

We are looking for survey responses from museums or galleries of any kind – multiple sites may want to submit by each major site. We wish to once again review our industry to assess how environmentally sustainable or ‘green’ our work practices and institutions are, and how our approaches to exhibitions have changed in the last ten years.

To see the results summary of the first survey issued in 2008 follow the following link to the report pdf: 2008 Survey Summary Report

In order to prepare and gather your information to complete this ten years on survey you can preview the survey first in its entirety by downloading the pdf at this link – and then start the survey when you are ready: 2018 Survey Questions Preview

This 2018 Survey is based on the original 2008 Survey so we can analyse ‘like for like’. We recognize though we may have advanced quite some way since then and that the questions/topics may have been overtaken by progress.

Most questions are ‘green’ and a few new ones ‘financial’ as we are taking this opportunity to see how tight budgets have affected exhibition programming and museum operations – perhaps with green benefits.

The actual survey will take roughly 30 minutes but you may need extra time to gather information. You can stop and start until finally selecting the ‘Submit’ button.

The survey will close on Sunday 30 September 2018 at midnight GMT.

The results from this 2018 survey will be added to and compared with the previous 2008 data we have collected and will be shared in November 2018. All respondents will be sent the survey analysis report by email in due course.

We understand how pressured your work-time is, so thank you in advance for your input. If you have any enquiries or questions about the survey, please email: stephen.mellor@chalkface.net.au

Please forward this email invitation and links to any contacts you have and who you think might be interested in taking the survey – we want to share/connect as widely as possible across the world and join up the many green initiatives, supporters and enthusiasts that are already ‘green exhibitions’ advocates.

Thank you,

Stephen Mellor

(Stephen Mellor, formerly Exhibitions Co-ordinator at Tate Modern, London and a committee member of the International Exhibition Organisers group, is managing this 2018 survey in association with Sustainable Exhibitions for Museums (SEFM).

This survey is a volunteer initiative and any views or information are offered in good faith.

Ben Kacyra decided to use [portable scanning] technology to found CyArk, a non-profit with a mission to preserve cultural heritage sites so that other sites could never be completely obliterated.

Now, CyArk has teamed up with Google Arts & Culture to launch an online library of its cultural heritage sites. Called Open Heritage, the project includes a trove of open-source data and visual representations of heritage sites.

Currently it chronicles 27 sites in 15 countries, including the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico, the ancient city of Bagan in Myanmar, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with more sites to be added in the future.

Open Heritage is meant to document a site at a particular point in time — essentially, a record of heritage that can be used for research in the future. According to Google, the Open Heritage is the world’s largest archive of this type of open-source heritage data. READ MORE

The award is organised by the NEMO partner European Museum Forum (EMF) in collaboration with the National Institute for Museums and Public Collections and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The EMYA and the Council of Europe Museum Prize are the longest running and most prestigious museum awards in Europe.

The 2018 winners and special commendations are presented below and more information can be found on EMF’s website.

The European Museum of the Year Award 2018 goes to the DESIGN MUSEUM, London, United Kingdom.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe decided to present its Museum Prize 2018 to the WAR CHILDHOOD MUSEUM in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. NEMO is especially happy to see the War Childhood Museum as one of the winners as the NEMO Executive Board was very moved after their visit to the museum last year.

The Silletto Prize goes to the BETINA MUSEUM OF WOODEN SHIPBUILDING, Betina, Croatia. The prize recognises excellence in working with the local community and involving volunteers.

The Kenneth Hudson Award goes to the ESTONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM, Tartu, Estonia. The award is given in recognition of the most unusual and daring achievement that challenges common perceptions of the role of museums in society.

Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, the only heritage site dedicated to the African-Caribbean British story, has responded to the Windrush scandal following publicity about the large number of people deported or threatened with deportation to the Caribbean after lifetimes in the UK.

The archive is hosting one-to-one sessions with a team of lawyers for people who are affected by the fallout. BCA’s Director Paul Reid said “the government has been forced into retreating into ‘administrative error’, a sign of defeat, but I hope we can do something more than just address the issue of citizenship. I want to see the contribution of the Windrush descendants and black people though British history taught in the curriculum, to the streets and our angry young people, but I want the links to go further, right into the boardrooms of Canary Wharf. We can take this moment to make a fundamental change, that is my hope.” He also told Museums Journal that the archive, which sits in a ‘symbiotic place…between culture and activism’ would have accepted the Windrush landing cards, destroyed by the government in 2010, into its collections.

As world leaders increasingly face up to the fallout of climate change, curators are planning a new wave of museums, devoted to what many consider a defining issue of the times.

From Germany to Denmark, Hong Kong to Canada, talk of climate museums is on the rise. In 2015 former civil rights lawyer Miranda Massie created the first U.S. museum entirely dedicated to climate change in New York City, which so far has featured footage of ancient ice cores and live painting of melting Antarctic ice.

Flow Associates, a London-based consultancy working with arts and science organizations, wanted to raise awareness of the plight of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels. So [they] set up a “ghost boat” made of old fish nets at the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and asked visitors what they would take with them if they were suddenly forced to leave their homes. READ MORE

The 11th European Registrars Conference (ERC 2018) will take place on 17 – 19 November 2018 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster

ERC 2018 will bring together registrars, collection and exhibition managers and colleagues from across the world. The European Registrars Conference takes place every two years and provides a fantastic forum to meet, network, exchange ideas and knowledge from across the sector.

The programme will focus on the conference’s key themes of Evolve, Refresh and Collaborate. The three themes will run throughout both days of the conference encompassing a number of topics.

The programme will be made up of keynote sessions, presented papers and smaller discussion sessions. We are hugely excited about our plans for the keynote sessions and details will be added shortly.

Included in the registration fee:

Attendance at the conference

Admission to the Welcome Reception, Farewell Reception, all sessions and market place

The status of museums, as cultural tenets, is poised on a delicate balance between politics (from government policy and decisions to exhibition display and presentation to the public) and the need to maintain integrity and independence.

The relationship between governments and cultural institutions can largely determine the museum’s role within the communities they serve and the type of services they provide, especially in countries where museums are dependent on government policy.

In this issue, authors from Greece, Russia, China, the United States, Latin America, Zimbabwe and Benin discuss how museums can respond to public policy and find alternatives to government pressure and funding cuts in the areas of human rights, international relations, national identity, education, indigenous rights, natural resources and cultural policy.

ICOM UK members can enjoy full access to this issue through their personal member space on ICOMMUNITY.